| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 科學教育研究所 === 91 === There are two purposes of this research. The first is to define the meaning of quantitative literacy and the second is to develop the most suitable instrument to assess high school students’ quantitative literacy in our country. On the validity of instrument stage, initially there are 410 high school students involved in this research. They are all chosen from senior high schools in Taipei . After I went through the foreign literature on this subject by content analysis, information gathered from the research include students’ performance in quantitative literacy and questionnaires of students’ background. On this study, quantitative analysis is the primary means for data analysis. On the following are the results we get from this research.
1. Quantitative literacy empowers people to use quantitative skills to solve and handle quantitative problems they meet on their daily life. Most scholars are of the view that quantitative skills should include data interpretation, estimation, measurement and uncertainty.
2. There are four aspects of designing the quantitative literacy instrument---the quantitative skills, indicators, practice contexts of quantitative literacy and different ways to present quantitative literacy problems. Students chosen on this research receive the highest grade on data interpretation; otherwise they get the lowest one in calculation. In addition, students do the best on data explanation and show the worst on data generation. In the topic of practice contexts, students perform well on clothing and do the worst on transportation. And the last but not the least, we can not recognize much difference from their performance on words, graphs, and tables.
3. After researching the instrument of quantitative literacy, I obtain some critical findings. Because of not assessing students’ speed of answering questions, the quantity of questions should not be many. It is not expected to affect students’ performance of quantitative literacy, when they are on test. Moreover, when questions of quantitative literacy are being created, we have to pay much attention to the questions we make. The questions should be the living examples. When students are on test, they’ll experience like they are on daily life. . Except the paper-and-pen tests, we can also add some questions of further performance assessment. if we want to further understand the quantitative literacy of high school student. Or we also can realize why they choose this or that answer, if they take the two-tier test.
4 According to the results of students’ performance in quantitative literacy and
questionnaires of students’ background, some discoveries are made. The more
easily students learn mathematics, the lower grades they’ll get on the performance
of quantitative literacy. That’s the same conclusion with some foreign professors.
People who does not perform well on math may have better performance on
quantitative literacy.
5. Finally, boys and girls only had difference in one of quantitative literacy
indicators: “use estimating techniques to generate data”. Boys’ performance is
better than girls’. This result is not as the same as some foreign literature. They
think quantitative literacy is one of basic skills everyone must have. Generally,
there is no difference between boys and girls in quantitative literacy, just like
reading and writing.
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